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From: jthomp@texsun.Central.Sun.COM (Jim Thompson )
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Is anyone interested in putting local time in the "Date:" header?
Message-ID: <1915@texsun.Central.Sun.COM>
Date: 2 Dec 89 13:55:18 GMT
References: <54794@looking.on.ca> <14785@well.UUCP> <55511@looking.on.ca>
Sender: news@texsun.Central.Sun.COM
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.  Mt. View, Ca.
Lines: 62

In article <55511@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes:
>In article <14785@well.UUCP> Jef Poskanzer <jef@well.sf.ca.us> writes:
>>You're wrong.

>What is with you, that you feel you have to respond to postings with
>strange statements, insults and references to the poster's person rather
>than the matters at hand.

Well, you are wrong, and you have posted articles like the one
mentioned before.  He was offensive, but then, you are wrong.


>I would have sent this by mail, but I tried that last time and it did
>no good.  Go away.

Now you're being offensive.

>Now, to get back to the actual issue (gasp), I belive that the local time
>is very much like a comment, because the purpose of it is to give you an
>idea of the poster's subjective environment when posting the item.  As it
>is subjective, and meant for human interpretation, it is by and large
>a comment.   If you would like to present a case as to why my computer would
>care what time it was at your house when you posted your article, let's
>hear it.

Your beliefs have not much to do with what the defined standard is.
Break the RFCs, and lots of us will start *actively* hunting down your
style of article and dropping it on the floor.  (If NNTP doesn't just
do this for us.)

Or have you forgotten that 99% of USENET flows via NNTP on the Internet?

>On the other hand, I can agree with the sentiment that if the information
>can be formally specified, it should be.  But not at a cost of adding a long
>string to every article, that's all.   The suggestion to simply use a date
>line with local time and a "different from Greenwich" indicator is probably
>the simplest.

I don't see what knowing the 'localtime' at site 'foo' has got to do
with *anything*.  If its a comment (and I belive its not!), then its a useless
comment, much akin to having a header:

Food:  The poster was digesting pancakes and scrambled eggs.

While it may be usefull for determining the state of the poster,
its got nothing to do with aritcle content.  I agree with you that
adding a header *just* for the localtime is bad.  I don't agree that
anything has to happen to 'Date:'.  For instance, its 8am here, but
I've been up since 8am yesterday.  Am I coherent?  Hardly ever, at
any hour.

I think its quite useful the way it is.  Since they're all based 
on a common format, its quite easy to generate an 'in-order' list
of articles (not much less with the +/- HHMM format, true, but
that breaks the code.)

Jim

Jim Thompson - Network Engineering - Sun Microsystems -	jthomp@central.sun.com
Member of the Fatalistic International Society for Hedonistic Youth (FISHY)
"I woudn't recommend sex, drugs, or unix for everyone, but they work for me."
					- Me (paraphrasing Hunter S. Thompson)